Author: Becky McCray

Professor Brian Whitacre teaches a class in Rural Economic Development at Oklahoma State University. He assigned his student teams each a county in Oklahoma, had them map the assets, figure location quotients and pull factors and things like that. But he also wanted to get at what would make their assigned small towns better places….

There’s an entire class of consultants out there who will come to your town and tell you what’s wrong with it. They take their template that they apply to every town from 500 to 500,000, and they walk around your town to see where you don’t fit. Then they make a long list of everything…

A couple of times lately people have said something about rural towns needing good leaders that really set me off.  One person (I’ve forgotten who) posted this slide from a presentation they were watching:  It says: “Core belief: The single most important factor in the future of rural communities is the presence of highly-skilled, highly-motivated…

Our current way of working together is what’s killing our efforts. The way we work together in formal committee structures assumes we’re all together on a train. All the influence is up front with the engineers, and everyone else is more or less along for the ride. That’s the way organizations have worked for a…

Back in my workforce development days circa 2003, I used this pair of diagrams with all the partnering organizations to illustrate the value of alignment: The cloud and the big arrow were our workforce system. All the little arrows were organizations, officials, programs and pieces of the workforce system. We were definitely a cloud, not…

Janet Soto Rodriguez picked out 6 themes from what I’ve written about lately that she felt were exactly what Oregon small towns most needed to hear as they work on entrepreneurship.  There are positive trends for small towns. It doesn’t matter what the numbers say about us, what negative story others are telling, what narrative…

Main Street America invited me to write about the future of retail in their annual report, State of Main. Of course I said yes, because I knew I could talk all about small towns.   There are a lot of experts on the retail industry. Many talk about the wave of retail closures. Most are focused…

“It’s not about bringing your town back. It’s about bringing your town forward.”  Last week I promised we would talk about what that looks like.   Imagine you had to start a town from scratch on the same piece of land where your town sits now. The catch is, you don’t get to keep anything. You…

I get a little frustrated when people tell me their town is dying. That’s because from my outside point of view, your town is not dying. It’s just exactly what it is now, no more or less.   To some extent, your generation determines what you think about your town and whether it’s dying. It’s not…

It’s one of our shared challenges: How can we get more people to the table?  Don’t have a table. Don’t have a meeting. Go do something. More people will turn out to do something small but meaningful than will turn out for something relatively difficult and not apparently meaningful. Most meetings, including those “participatory” community…

Dear Small Towns,  Stop reading the economic development RFP list of businesses asking you to compete with incentives to lure them in.  Love, Your entire town HowdyYou have more than enough to do to build local opportunity. You have plenty of potential business right here.  You could be focusing on supporting what Mark Riffey calls “Two…

How many variations of this have you heard:  We’re a small town; we can’t afford to let people duplicate efforts  It would be so much more efficient if we didn’t have so many overlapping projects  If we just knew what everyone was doing, we could streamline and eliminate all the conflicting events We already do something like…